Rise of Zhdanov

ジュダーノフ台頭

The reversal of fortunes of Beria and Malenkov marked the resurrection of their enemy, Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s special friend, that hearty, pretentious intellectual who, after the stress of Leningrad, was plump alcoholic… Stalin openly talked about Zhdanov as his successor.
… Stalin… recalled him from Leningrad and promoted him to Party Deputy in charge of Agitprop and relations with foreign Parties, making him more powerful than he had been before the war….
Zhdanov had played his cards cleverly since returning in January 1945. He consolidated his own camarilla of Leningraders to power in Moscow: Alexei Kuznetsov… received Malenkov’s Secretaryship. Zhdanov understood that Stalin did not wish Beria to control the MGB so he suggested Kuznetsov to replace him as curator of the Organs… Kuznetsov’s promotion earned him the undying hatred of the two most vindictive predators in the Stalinist jungle: Beria and Malenkov.
By February 1946, with Stalin in semi-retirement, Zhdanov seemed to have control of the Party as well as cultural and foreign policy matters, and to have neutralized the Organs and the military… At the November parade, Zhdanov, in Stalin’s absence, took the salute with his Leningrad camarilla filling the Mausoleum.
Stalin and Zhdanov picked up where they left off before the war, debating how to merge the patriotic Russianness of the war with the Bolshevism of the Revolution in order to eradicate foreign influence and restore morality, pride and discipline….
… Victory had blessed the marriage of Russianness and Bolshevism: Stalin saw the Russians as the binding element of the USSR, the ‘elder brother’ of the Soviet peoples….
On 18 April, Zhdanov launched his cultural terror, known as Zhdanovshchina, with an attack on the Leningrad journals… He followed this up with attacks on film-makers and musicians. At a notorious meeting with Shostakovich and others, the ‘Pianist’ tinkled on the piano to demonstrate easily-hummed people’s tunes, a vision as absurd as Joseph II admonishing Mozart for writing ‘too many tunes’.
Zhdanov’s campaign to promote Russian patriotism was soon so absurd that Sakharov remembered how people would joke about ‘Russia, homeland of the elephant’. More ominously, the unleashing of Russian nationalism and the attacks on ‘cosmopolitans’ turned against the Jews. (pp. 479-483)

ユダヤ人への疑念増大

Early in the war, Stalin realized the usefulness of Soviet Jewry in appealing for American help but even then the project was stained with blood. Stalin then ordered Beria to set up the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, controlled by NKVD but officially led by the famous Yiddish actor, Solomon Mikhoels….
When the advancing Soviet Army exposed Hitler’s unique Jewish genocide, Khrushchev, the Ukrainian boss, resisted any special treatment for Jews staggering home from the death camps….
… Mikhoels complained to Molotov that ‘after the Jewish catastrophe, the local authorities pay no attention’… Khrushchev agreed to help ‘Abramoviches’.
Encouraged by this growing sympathy, Mikhoels and his colleague [Isaak S.] Fefer, a poet and MGB plant, suggested a Jewish republic in Crimea (now empty of Tatars), or in Saratov (now empty of the Volga Germans) to Molotov and his deputy in charge of the JAFC, [Solomon] Lozovsky….
‘Everyone,’ recalls Vladimir Redens, ‘believed Jewish Crimea would happen.’ Molotov, showing more independence than before, may have discussed this with Beria but his judgement almost cost his life. Most of those involved were dead within five years.
On 2 February 1944 Mikhoels delivered his letter to Molotov, copied to Stalin who now decided that the actor had moved from Soviet to Jewish propaganda… Zhdanov supervised the making of lists of Jews in different departments and recommended closing down of JAFC.
… The supremacy of America with its powerful Jewish community made [Stalin’s] own Jews, with their US connections restored during the war, appear a disloyal Fifth Column… Equally, he loathed any people with mixed loyalties: he noticed the Holocaust had touched and awakened Soviet Jewry even among the magnates. His new anti-Semitism flowed from his own seething paranoia, exacerbated when Fate entangled the Jews in his family. (pp. 484-486)

元帥ジューコフの脱落

‘As soon as hostilities end,’ Stalin said at Yalta, ‘the soldiers are forgotten and lapse into oblivion.’ He wished this was so but the prestige of Marshal Zhukov had never been higher.
Stalin ‘managed’ Zhukov by using the ‘Aviators’ Case’ against him, torturing Air Marshal Novikov to implicate him… In March, Zhukov was recalled to Moscow. Instead of reporting directly to the Generalissimo, he was summoned by Stalin’s deputy as Armed Forces Minister, Bulganin, ‘the Plumber’… Stalin ordered ‘the Plumber’ to prepare a kangaroo court against Zhukov. Abakumov searched Zhukov’s homes which turned out to be an Aladdin’s cave of booty.
In early June, Zhukov was summoned to the Supreme Military Council. Stalin strode in ‘as gloomy as a black cloud’. Without a word, she tossed a note to Shtemenko.
‘Read it,’ he snapped. Shtemenko read out Novikov’s testimony that Zhukov had claimed for the Soviet victory, criticized Stalin and created his own clique. He had even awarded a medal to the starlet Lydia Ruslanova, with whom he may have been having an affair.
… Zhukov defended himself but admitted to having inflated his importance.
… Zhukov… was expelled from the CC, his trophies confiscated, friends tortured, and then further demoted to the Urals…. (pp. 486-487)

飢餓蔓延。ミコヤン、フルシチョフへの批判

Stalin continued to seethe about the inconvenience of his people starving, Hungry Thirty Three again… Then, when even Zhdanov reported the famine, Stalin blamed Khrushchev, his Ukrainian viceroy as he had done in 1932: ‘They’re deceiving you…’ Yet 282,000 people died in 1946, 520,000 in 1947. Finally he turned on the Supply maestro, Mikoyan…
Mikoyan was clever enough to apologize.
… Like Molotov, Mikoyan’s old intimacy with Stalin was over. Khrushchev too fell into disfavour about his attitude to the famine… (pp. 494-495)